Time Bomb
Several hundred people, most of them Fatah supporters, have been camped out at Erez, saying they fear for their lives unless they are allowed to escape through Israel to the West Bank.
. . . Israel, which closed the checkpoint on Thursday, has said it will not allow a crossing by the group, which includes some women and children.
More broadly, Gaza has been cut off for four days now. While aid officials say the situation is not yet dire, Israel will not deal with Hamas, even at the low level of coordinating trucks through checkpoints.
“Hamas is a terrorist organization,” said Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the Coordinator of Activities in the Territories, the Israeli government agency that deals with the Palestinian areas. “They can’t say on the one hand that they want to destroy Israel, and on the other ‘we need your help.’ We won’t help Hamas. From our point of view, let them fail.” [Emphasis mine]
. . . With Gaza almost wholly dependent on the outside world for food, and with 1.1 million of its 1.5 million people receiving some sort of food assistance, the clock is ticking toward crisis.
If Israel can't find a way to get refugees out of Gaza and into the West Bank, then an unwillingness to coordinate with Hamas will translate simply as an unwillingness to deal with Palestinians, period. If Mahmoud Abbas and his new West Bank Fatah government want to isolate Hamas and gain ground among Palestinians then they need to work with Israel to get refugees out of harm's way in the western territory.
Additionally, it seems the US should take an active share of the responsibility for relocating Gazan refugees, since it was the US who pushed for Palestinian elections against Israel's better judgment.
Despite deep Israeli misgivings, the United States encouraged Abbas to hold Palestinian legislative elections -- and Abbas invited Hamas to participate, believing he could beat them at the polls. But Hamas won, giving Hamas control of the cabinet and of the powerful prime minister's post that had been created at the behest of the United States.
The Bush administration, in pushing for democratic elections yet rejecting the outcome, has sold the moral high ground out from under democracy and created a further morass in the Middle East. This will be as difficult to untangle as anything else in the region, and absolutely everybody except Hamas stands to lose in the short term.
Yup."The less we try to intervene and shape Palestinian politics, the better off we will be," said Robert Malley, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the International Crisis Group. "Almost every decision the United States has made to interfere with Palestinian politics has boomeranged."
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